The World Wide Web can be thought of as the totality of content that can be accessed from web browsers via the public Internet. Commonly the content is structured as “web pages”—hypertext markup language (HTML) documents—that are served to web browser clients from web servers (host computers with access to data stores containing the content). When rendered by a web browser, the text and possibly images embedded in the HTML documents as a link to an image file is presented on a display screen. Often the HTML document embeds links to other content, and these links may be presented in the web page highlighted or otherwise indicated to be active links that can be selected.
A uniform resource locator (URL) may be viewed as a web address and may be used to access content on the World Wide Web via the public Internet. A URL may identify a protocol (e.g., http), a domain name or host name (e.g., example.com), and optionally a file name. For example, the URL http://patft.uspto.gov/embeds the fully qualified domain name “patft.uspto.gov”; the URL http://www.example.com/embeds the fully qualified domain name “example.com.” The structure of the domain name comprises, from right to left, a top level domain (e.g., .gov, .com, .org., .net, .edu, and others), a second-level domain (e.g., uspto and example), a third-level domain (e.g., patft), and possibly other levels of domain name.